


Pothos

by doctorbleak



Series: Green Girls: A Guide To Coping On Earth C [2]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: Earth C (Homestuck), F/M, Gen, Implied Healthy Relationships That Jade Isn't In, Implied Unhealthy Relationships, Metaphorical Foliage, Minor Dave Strider/Karkat Vantas, Not Canon Compliant - The Homestuck Epilogues, One-Sided Jade Harley/Dave Strider, POV Second Person, Post-Canon, Symbolic Fruit
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-08
Updated: 2020-01-08
Packaged: 2021-02-27 11:35:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,709
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22166470
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/doctorbleak/pseuds/doctorbleak
Summary: Jade Harley, 21, sits in a greenhouse that she built and thinks about the plants. This is something that she does often, though not so often as to make a habit of sitting alone.
Series: Green Girls: A Guide To Coping On Earth C [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1595536
Comments: 2
Kudos: 4





	Pothos

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Sonia Grace](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=Sonia+Grace).



You are now Jade Harley and you are alone with your thoughts.

You mean alone in a greenhouse.

Something that has always bothered you, even considering the gifted horticulturist that you may be, is the lack of finality that comes with the death of a plant.  
In every other line of work—or, at least, any that she can think of—it is hard to ignore it when something goes wrong, most often being something that can be easily tracked and measured. A radiation leak can be detected with a Geiger counter, while a technical flaw in machinery can be exposed fairly rapidly just by checking it over enough times and looking for the problem. Taxidermy is easy to mess up, but it’s even easier to avoid mistakes once you’re aware of the possibility for them. It’s easy to observe a hole, a break in the stitching, a crooked seam; when a part of the body is limp, you know immediately that it is missing stuffing. Even things that she is not as experienced in are things that she knows have measurable failure states. On occasion, you find yourself helping your sister with baking, a habit that you’re both quite recent to getting into. This is perhaps the easiest of your hobbies to track failure with. Things that are done poorly will be visibly wrong; blackened spots, or bits too doughy to be done, or simply a bad taste in the mouth. When you have failed to make a cake, it is easy to know; you can simply look and know that you’ve failed.

This is not so with plants, which is something that you ponder as you sit in your garden, hair back in a wild ponytail, glasses crooked on your face, too big for you in spite of the fact that they’re all you’ve ever worn. At present, in your gardening finest, you sit in a greenhouse that you built and think about the plants. This is something that you do often, though not so often as to make a habit of sitting alone. It’s not without cause; you never come out here just to stare at the plants and do nothing with them. Rather, today, you’ve decided to check up on a plant that you have been having trouble with. Having spent the past several years with canine physiology, you rarely have much need for vegetables, thus you much more rarely grow them than you used to, though you still have a fondness for a good pumpkin. Instead, for lack of vegetation, you much more often lean towards the cultivation of houseplants. Devil’s ivy is among your latest projects, as it is a plant that is by all means meant to be easy to grow. This is part of why you were drawn to it; immortals are, by nature, drawn to that which cannot be killed, or at least not easily. This, then, endeared you to it. It was not hurt by the fact that its flowers are only produced in particularly bizarre circumstances; devil’s ivy is not a flowering plant, traditionally, but can become so with the addition of hormones. This was something that you found charming in its own right, for reasons largely related to feeling more than a bit seen due to your own hormonal experiences, and was something that your sister got a decent laugh out of for similar reasons, so you went ahead and bought the seeds.

This was about where your progress stagnated. Regardless of how easy it is to grow devil’s ivy, you could not seem to get it to flourish. This, understandably, was frustrating. Jade is not a bad gardener; far from it, even, as it’s easily one of her few passions in the world, a practice that allows for growth from someone who is permanently locked within a fixed state of immortality. Thus, there was no reason that she shouldn’t be able to tend to one of the easiest plants to possibly care for; this is why it came as a surprise when, after a time, it simply ceased to grow. She had not personally erred in any way, so surely something must be observably wrong. Meticulously, each morning, she checked each and every part of the process, eye watchful for flaws. Was it being properly fertilized? Was she overwatering, or perhaps even underwatering? What about its sunlight? Was it being blocked out by the sunflowers on the table beside it? Each question she asked was presented with an affirmation that she was doing everything correctly; this, of course, only frustrated her further. Thus, today, she had finally come to where she now was; it was time to simply check if it had died, always her least favorite part of horticulture.

On paper and in theory, it is as easy to check for a plant’s death as it is to check for the failure of any other line of work. When a plant dies, its stem changes consistency. If it is close to death, or dead outright, it will cease to retain its rubbery, pliable texture, instead becoming either too mushy to support itself or too brittle to do the same. Most often, if this is true, this will trace down to the roots and the roots will share these qualities. However, this is only true on paper. Nature is miraculous, at times; plants that seem perfectly healthy will wither and die, while ones that seem close to death will spring to life and flower. This is, of course, due to the fact that a human understanding of the inner workings of a plant can only go so far. A human being is not a microscope, thus meaning that every judgment on the frailty of a plant will have to be a personal investment into its processes; health is relative, which means that every decision about if a plant is healthy is a judgment being made, not an objective statement of fact. To this end, then, it is natural that humans cannot decide when a plant is in a place that will cause a seeming miracle. As Jade thumbs over the stem, she feels for frailty and finds what she believes to be weakness. It isn’t hard for her to find it, especially without gloves. She squints, removing her glasses and wiping dirt off of them and onto her faded green overalls, then fiddles with the stem of a plant next to the ivy, trying to compare the two. What makes this difficult is that she’s comparing one of her usual planets—a garden variety one, if one might be so bold—to a scandent plant; while, again, on paper, it is easy to test for firmness in a stem, it is not as easy when it trails off into vines. Ultimately, she fails to decide if it’s truly dead or not and commits to simply continuing to try to grow it; if she cannot be sure it’s dead, she can’t give up on it.

Straightening the vase that it’s being kept in on its little table, she gets up from her squatted position—too tall, at just a few inches short of 6 feet, to tend to it without kneeling—and wipes her hands on her overalls, getting rid of a modicum of the dirt that they’d been caked in tending to all of the plants before this one. With her hands as clean as they’re going to get until she takes herself back into the hive and washes up, she huffs at the Schrodinger in front of her and turns away from the ivy to a much more productive plant, one of the only ones that still bears active fruit, both in the literal and the metaphorical; a small apple tree. As she steps over to it and sees that it’s bearing fruit as healthily as it usually does, she smiles and plucks a few small, juicy crabapples. These are Dave’s favorite; she knows that he’ll be happy when she brings them inside and juices them, even if you know as well as he does that his infatuation with apple juice is something you all blow out of proportion for the sake of laughs. Similarly intended for the sake of laughs is the fact that, on the little wooden bucket she collects the fruit in each time she’s out here, there’s a little heart painted in his red. This is meant to be doubly lighthearted. On one hand, it’s a silly little wink and nod to the fact that no one but Dave ever eats fruit from out here; it’s not as if Karkat even can eat it, what with the fact that troll diets almost exclusively favor meat. On the other hand, though, it’s essentially equivalent to shoving apples into a giant condom, something that never fails to make Dave laugh in that small, subtle way that Jade always picks up on and that she never sees anyone else get out of him in the same way. Jade lives for those little smiles, the same way she always has. Even If she can’t keep devil’s ivy healthy, the least she can do is make sure she still keeps Dave happy so that she can say she got something out of her efforts in the garden all the same.  
  
The pep put back in your step by a successful apple harvest, you swivel on your heels, tail swaying behind you, and start to step towards the door. Surprising you is that, when you go to reach for it, it opens on its own to reveal just the person you were thinking about. Making yourself presentable out of habit, you go to wipe some dirt off of your cheek, but only really wipe more into it. That draws a small, quiet laugh out of Dave, who watches it happen as he opens the door, so you aren’t really able to be bothered by the fact that you just did perhaps the polar opposite of making yourself look nicer, which is something that you’re not sure why you really feel the compulsion to do in the first place.

JADE: dave!  
JADE: hello  
DAVE: hey  
DAVE: dont mean to intrude on your mad busy pumpkin shop times  
JADE: no youre fine!  
JADE: actually I was just about to leave  
DAVE: yeah I guess thats what you would be doing with the apple bucket actually  
DAVE: i mean its not like you use that sob for literally anything except this  
JADE: haha yeah  
JADE: i was actually on my way out to make them into juice for you!  
DAVE: hell yes  
DAVE: youre the best as usual  
JADE: daww, i know :B  
JADE: so what brings you out here!  
DAVE: oh right  


You rock on your heels enthusiastically as you wait for him to explain why he's stopped by to see you, which is something that, if you were more conscious of your own body language around him, you'd rather not be doing; you don't like seeming needy or obsessive, but you can't help but seem happy every time he's around. Not as though your humanoid body language really matters when you have a tail, that said, which betrays any attempt to pretend that you aren't just as happy to see him as you always are.

DAVE: yeah so  
DAVE: im going out to the movies with karkat tonight  
DAVE: and i wanted to stop by and let you know that youre like  
DAVE: free to have the reign of the place in there  
DAVE: as long as you dont go and like  
DAVE: piss on the furniture or anything  


Your heart sinks. _That_ is something that you're consciously aware of, so you keep your tail wagging, now deliberately, and you flash a smile, equally so. You might wish that he had come here because he wanted to hang out with you, but you're glad he's keeping busy and try to show it.

JADE: oh alright!  
JADE: i hope you guys have a fun time  
JADE: ill just, um  
JADE: well i dont really have any plans?  
DAVE: do you usually  
DAVE: other than like  
DAVE: flirting with chessmen and stuff  


That one stings, in a way you know he didn't really intend for it to.

JADE: haha, not really, i guess!  
JADE: how abouuut  
JADE: i stick behind and get to juicing these girls here  
JADE: and then when you guys get back you can have a nice cold beverage  
DAVE: sweet  
DAVE: see previous statement about you being the best  
DAVE: ok well ill leave you to that  
DAVE: see you later harley  


Just like that, he closes the door and you are confined to being alone again. You let out a sigh and your tail stops wagging, the cheer drained from you once more; naturally, this causes your mind to drift back to the day's failures, not its successes. For all the small victories, you put in a lot of effort for things that aren't paying dividends at all. Is it really worth it just for the satisfaction of being able to say that you were able to pick some fruit? You are, quite literally, managing to make this bear fruit, you suppose, but it feels a bit hopeless sometimes. You're living within a routine, you feel, and you've never done good as a creature of habit, perhaps somewhat ironically due to the fact that you err so heavily towards forming habits. At the same time, though, what can you really do except the formation of a routine? If it is bearing fruit in some form, even for the most fleeting of times, is it not worth the effort? Yes, you decide; you are a lot of things, but you are not a quitter. You like to garden; it is something you have been dedicating yourself to since you were young, which you have remained passionate about this whole time and which you missed deeply when your time on the ship forcibly blocked you off from interacting with it at all. You are not going to give up the chance to make something out of it, even if all it amounts to a lot of days is growing a few apples that you can turn into juice for a quick smile.

Setting the apples down, you reach into the pockets of your overalls, pull out a pair of green gardening gloves, and slip them over your hands, ready to change out the soil yet again and try to grow the ivy the same way that you've been doing this whole time. Maybe all it takes is a willingness to keep changing the soil and adding new fertilizer; maybe, with enough water, it will just decide to keep growing. You, after all, are the Witch of Space, a role that exclusively operates within the big picture; you are willing to wait months, years, decades, just to make sure that the bigger picture of your end goal ends up realized, which will then prove that your hard work was all worth it in the first place. Maybe all you need to do is separate yourself from your anxieties about it somewhat; the gloves will make it harder to notice how fragile the stems seem to be, which will make it easier to tell yourself that it's not really as much of a lost cause as it otherwise feels like. You are a gardener by trade and by passion and you will be able to make this work somehow, even if you have to take some extra steps to convince yourself of that. The good thing about how hard it is to tell when a plant is dead is that, sometimes, you will get lucky. With enough time and dedication, sometimes you will simply be proven wrong. The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result, but the definition of determination is doing the same thing for long enough that you know that its result will come to change as long as you adjust your angle slightly each time.

Devil's ivy is poisonous to dogs, but you will still do anything and everything that you can to make sure it grows.

**Author's Note:**

> I've been meaning, for a while now, to do a short little thing about Jade coping badly, a lot like my previous Calliope one. I guess that the push I needed was getting broken up with, since it's had me in my own head about the idea of not being able to move on from your idealized perception of how you want your future to turn out, even if it hurts you. This is me trying to voice my thoughts on that, then, I suppose.


End file.
